For years, fisherman Sami Uddin lived and worked on a small patch of coastal land in southeastern Bangladesh – until the site was earmarked for development including a new cyclone-resistant deep-sea port, funded by Japan in the name of climate change adaptation.
“The development is [meant to help us] all, but the reality is that it takes our homes, professions, and they are forcing us to be evicted from our village,” Uddin, 51, said close to the port site in Matarbari, adding that new fishing restrictions nearby have fuelled local people’s anger.
The deep-sea port – being built next door to a new coal-fired power plant, also financed by Japan – is a centrepiece of Bangladesh’s ambitions to develop a “Singapore-style” economic hub on its climate-vulnerable Bay of Bengal coastline, a low-lying belt of densely populated land, prone to deadly tropical cyclones and flooding.
Funded with a $726-million concessional loan, half of which was counted by Japan as climate adaptation finance, the port marks the biggest single climate adaptation project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023, according to an analysis by Climate Home News of the latest data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
But like other foreign-funded projects classed as “climate adaptation”, Climate Home’s reporting raises questions about whether the port investment will help climate-vulnerable local communities cope with the effects of more extreme weather and rising seas.
Japan’s development agency said the resilience measures to protect the port are crucial to preventing economic shocks and the disruption of essential services in case of disasters, while some interventions could also keep local people safer when storms hit.
COP30 president warns of ‘dystopian scenario’
Climate adaptation is set to be a key theme at next month’s COP30 UN climate summit in Brazil, and calls are growing for rich nations to increase their support for projects to help developing countries that are bearing the brunt of worsening climate impacts.
COP30 president André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said last week that the UN talks should take concrete steps to help vulnerable people adapt to a warming world and avoid a “dystopian scenario” in which only the rich can afford to protect themselves from climate threats.
But with just a fraction of needs for adaptation funding currently being met, according to the latest UN estimates, climate campaigners told Climate Home News that mega-projects like Matarbari are not the best way to protect the world’s poorest people from climate change.
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They are also sounding the alarm about how a lack of uniform reporting rules and poor transparency in the data give countries free rein over what they label as adaptation finance.
Some donors “cheat” by focusing more on inflating numbers than on delivering real impact, said John Nordbo, senior climate advisor at NGO CARE Denmark and co-author of the annual “Climate Finance Shadow Report”.
“They label large projects with little or no adaptation component as ‘climate finance’,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s misleading – and when exposed, it undermines trust in the entire global climate regime.”
The $363 million provided by Japan for the Matarbari port was counted as adaptation finance under official data used to measure whether donors are meeting their promises on climate finance made at UN talks. It accounted for an estimated 15% of Japan’s total contributions to climate adaptation in 2023 – the latest year for which data is available.
“No one must be left behind”
When, at COP26, Japan committed to doubling its assistance for adaptation to $14.8 billion in public and private finance by 2025, its then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told fellow world leaders “no one must be left behind as we confront the issue of climate change”. He added that investments would focus on disaster risk reduction.
Japan said the delivery of that pledge was “on track” in its latest assessment report for the UN earlier this year.
But Climate Home’s analysis of the data from the OECD – the main body tracking global climate finance flows from industrialised nations – found that in 2023 Tokyo channelled at least a third of its bilateral adaptation finance into large-scale infrastructure projects and broad health programmes that lacked clear climate adaptation objectives.
It counted loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars for the construction of mass rapid transit in Jakarta and the rollout of universal health coverage in Egypt as adaptation finance, for example. It offered no explanation in project documents of how either initiative would strengthen resilience to climate impacts.
It also reported a $200-million grant to the global vaccine alliance, Gavi, to support its COVID-19 response as having “significant” relevance for climate adaptation. In an assessment of Gavi in 2024, the Multilateral Performance Network described as a “serious challenge” the fact that addressing climate change was not yet a core objective within the alliance’s strategy.
Md Shamsuddoha, a former climate negotiator for Bangladesh who now leads the Center for Participatory Research and Development, said Japan repackages “pure investment projects” for infrastructure development as climate finance to show it is meeting its commitments made under the UN climate regime.
“Japan should not do this, because that is no climate finance at all,” Shamsuddoha added.
Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its overseas aid arm, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), were approached for comment on the adaptation relevance of these projects, but had not responded by the time of publication.
Roadbuilding and energy projects
Climate Home’s analysis found Japan was not alone among major donors in labelling funds for large transport and energy infrastructure projects, or broad health programmes, as bilateral climate adaptation finance, which tends to be provided in grant form or as highly concessional lending to the poorest nations.
France and South Korea have used a similar approach, according to our analysis of the data from the OECD.
The three countries’ bilateral funding for those projects totalled at least $4 billion in 2023, but South Korea and France do not disclose the exact portion they have counted as climate adaptation finance.
According to the OECD data, France described loans provided for energy projects in developing countries as having a primary objective of adaptation, without giving a clear explanation of how they would boost climate resilience. They include strengthening electricity grids in Pakistan and Argentina, a hydropower plant in Tanzania and work to develop decarbonisation plans in Uzbekistan.
South Korea is not part of the group of developed countries under the UN climate regime and is therefore not obliged to provide climate finance to poor nations. But, in recent years, the country – one of the world’s largest economies – has hailed its “significant” support to the Global South for climate adaptation interventions.
Transport projects made up a significant portion of South Korea’s adaptation spending in developing countries in 2023. It counted the construction of a railway bridge in Bangladesh, a major highway in Vietnam and road networks in Cambodia and the Philippines among its top adaptation projects.
Hanna Hakko, a senior policy advisor at think-tank E3G, said developing countries have a critical need to build new resilient infrastructure and climate-proof what they already have.
“However, there is a need for clarity and guardrails around what counts as resilient infrastructure and to ensure impacted communities benefit from these projects and environmental impacts are minimised,” she added.
The climate ministries of South Korea and France had not responded to Climate Home’s request for clarifications on their adaptation finance at the time of publication.
Limited transparency in reporting system
Other donor governments such as Denmark, Switzerland and Finland take a more conservative approach, only counting pure climate adaptation activities or funding donated as grants in their spending.
But limited transparency in the reporting system makes it difficult to tell how much money overall is directed at efforts that truly help the most vulnerable communities to better cope with the escalating impacts of climate change.
Countries disclose brief and vague descriptions of the projects, often failing to offer details on their relevance for climate adaptation, Climate Home found.
Foreign aid cuts put adaptation finance pledge at risk, NGOs warn
Some European countries, including Germany, France and Italy, did not even identify a specific project or recipient nation for non-concessional funding worth hundreds of millions of dollars that was tagged as adaptation finance.
Ian Mitchell, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, said the problem lies with setting international goals to provide a certain amount of finance without a broadly agreed definition of what that finance can consist of.
“It is a pretty damaging state of affairs because these agreements are reached to motivate other countries to undertake climate action,” he added.
Focus on plugging adaptation gap
At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow four years ago, developed countries committed to doubling adaptation funding for developing nations from 2019 levels to reach at least $40 billion by 2025.
That promise now looks set to be broken. According to the latest UN Environment Programme Adaptation Gap Report, international public adaptation funding from wealthy governments stood at only $26 billion in 2023 – falling slightly from the previous year.
UNEP’s report, released on Wednesday, warns that this year’s target “will be missed if current trends continue”.
Since 2023, widespread cuts to aid budgets amid geopolitical tensions and fiscal pressures have likely put the Glasgow goal further out of reach. Least-developed countries (LDCs), meanwhile, are pushing for a new goal to be set at COP30 to boost adaptation finance to about $100 billion a year by 2030.
Brazil’s COP presidency also wants to elevate climate adaptation, which has long missed out on political attention and funding directed instead to efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The renewed focus on adaptation in Belém could also increase scrutiny of how donor countries are allocating climate finance in countries like Bangladesh, and whose interests they are serving.
Climate-friendly coal plant?
Japan’s investments in Matarbari, for example, come as the country seeks to develop its economic ties with Bangladesh and counter China’s growing influence in the region.
Even the 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant, which JICA has financed with loans worth more than $2 billion, was counted by Japan as climate finance. It said the technology installed by Japanese firms made the plant more efficient, leading to a reduction in emissions compared to a conventional station.
The plant is expected to spew into the atmosphere nearly 7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – equivalent to the total annual emissions generated by a small country like Mauritius.
As ships needed to deliver coal to fuel the plant, the developers built a port and a navigation channel connecting it to the ocean. Those facilities are now being expanded with the construction of the neighbouring deep-sea commercial port, which Japan agreed to fund in 2023 with a $726-million concessional loan.
Expected to be completed in 2029 by Japanese companies, the project aims to increase Bangladesh’s ability to handle cargo and spur economic activity in the area.
Takahiro Okamoto, who oversees the project at JICA’s Bangladesh office, said the inclusion of protections, like breakwaters, retaining walls and raised embankments, will shield the port and its access road from the impact of storm surges and cyclones.
“By allowing larger, more efficient ships to dock directly, the project reduces the country’s reliance on smaller, vulnerable ports and trans-shipment hubs in other countries, which might be more susceptible to disruptions from climate change and other factors,” Okamoto added.
Loss of salt and shrimp farms
Amid the bustle of construction activity, local residents in the area were sceptical about whether the development will make them better prepared for tidal surges or more frequent and severe storms.
Even if it does, they said the cost to their communities has been too high.
Over a third of the salt and shrimp farms in the area would be lost as a result of the construction, an impact assessment carried out by JICA found, adding that the mega-project would affect an area inhabited by almost 800,000 people.
Habibur Rahman, an unemployed 24-year-old man, said the development was not offering stable job opportunities for locals, while the coal power plant was causing growing pollution and damaging fishing activities.
“The [port] authority did not take a single project to develop our lives,” Rahman said.
Chittagong Port Authority and the Shipping Ministry did not reply to requests for comment.
JICA’s Okamoto said contractors are encouraged to employ local residents “as much as possible”, while 500 people have so far been trained under a programme that supports alternative income-generating activities.
He added that embankments built along the access road to the port to protect it would also serve as evacuation routes in disasters and that further protective measures may be considered as part of a separate plan being worked on by the Bangladesh government.
In the meantime, rising sea levels and stronger tidal flooding continue to chip away at the coast and swallow homes in the area, local media have reported.
“In no way [is] this an adaptation or resilience project,” Shamsuddoha said of the Matarbari development, saying it did not represent “resilient livelihoods” that would support coastal communities.
While developed countries pour their money into headline climate investment projects, the human dimension of adaptation is “completely missing”, he added.
The post Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs appeared first on Climate Home News.
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.